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 Jamie with David Letterman in 2006 |
Whipping up hype, or the naked truth about Jamie Oliver?
Gilly Smith’s unauthorised biography of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver makes for a tasty read, writes Dan Carrier
The Jamie Oliver Effect.
By Gilly Smith Andre Deutsch, £8.99. order this book
JAMIE Oliver’s food is a symbol of a new Britain, a marker of how much our diets have improved in the past 15 years.
But despite his influence in improving what is doled out at dinner across the UK the TV chef has the ability to make people feel nauseous.
Whether it’s the wide- boy patter he uses to tell us what ingredients we should buy from the supermarket he promotes, or his Primrose Hill Sunday supplement lifestyle with his wife, the uber-trendy “yummy mummy” Jools and their children with the irritating names of Daisy Boo and Poppy Honey, there is something about the Olivers which induces a sensation akin to eating week-old tripe.
Food writer Gilly Smith acknowledges this in her new, unauthorised, biography of The Naked Chef. But she also manages, by charting his career and discussing the catering trade that produced him, to paint a picture of a successful TV entrepreneur who has managed to couple a passion for food with a refreshing, if naïve, social conscience.
Oliver’s publicists say Jamie refused to co-operate with Smith for the book. But rather than be a hindrance, it has allowed her to touch on the unpleasant aspects of being in the public eye, to rake up tabloid gossip of bad behaviour.
While occasionally gushing in her praise, Smith also unceremoniously rips the giblets out of the life and times of Oliver. It makes for a tasty read.
Oliver has always been a figure that the media have enjoyed mocking. Despite his work setting up Fifteen, a restaurant staffed by apprentices he had trained, the tabloids refused to see the good he was doing. They wanted dirt.
Reporters enrolled on the scheme, much to Oliver’s annoyance, hoping to find a chink in the goody-goody’s armour. They looked for problems between Oliver and his wife, fuelled by the warts-and-all style of his TV shows that brought the cameras into the family home and filmed them when they were not smiling at each other (He was wrongly accused of having a dirty weekend in Amsterdam). And TV critics found an easy target when knocking out a column. His bish-bash-bosh cooking style, delivered in his Estuary tones, grated. It was the patter, not the platters, that annoyed.
According to Smith, his success is partly based on the fact that in his early TV show The Naked Chef, he cooked in a way that made it all look so simple – it was a bit of this, a dollop of that, a smidgen of the other. He appealed to the lads like him who had styled, “messy” hair, wore distressed denim and who wanted to impress the girls in their lives.
One friend of Oliver told Smith The Naked Chef appealed to young men who wanted to seduce women.
”It was about what to cook for your girlfriend,” they said.
“Before Jamie, blokes in their 20s lived in a tip and relied on their mothers to do their cooking and laundry. But here was a guy who looked cool. Suddenly it was about energetic guys doing something. And he was so into food, and that is what made him high.
“It was inspirational for young men who wanted to pull.”
But apart from being there when cooking was becoming cool, there is a more important side to the Jamie Oliver story.
Oliver arrived on our screens when there was an increasing realisation that the way we fuelled our bodies affected a range of other social issues, from children’s behaviour to the pressures placed on the NHS. Poor food was sending our kids into hyperactive delirium, while the NHS was dealing with ever expanding waistlines, heart disease, cancers.
Oliver turned his guns towards what was going into school dinners. Though he admits his own children are not likely to be affected by the poor quality of food served in state schools – he sent his youngsters to a Hampstead prep school – he saw it as a challenge and one that would make for interesting television.
“Jamie was poised to stoke the fires that had been simmering for some time in school kitchens,” writes Smith, saying the twin evils of a loss of home economics from the curriculum and the privatisation of school dinners meant you had poor food served to people who couldn’t boil an egg.“We have a government that should stop making suggestions and do a handful of things that will improve our children’s health, lives and capacity to learn,” said Jamie as he launched his plan to work in school canteens in Greenwich to teach dinner staff to cook healthy meals, and teach children to ditch junk food.
It sparked a national debate which prompted the government to plough an extra £40 million into food services.
The book flash-fries his childhood: we hear of how he struggled at school because of his dyslexia, but brimmed with confidence; of weekends working in his father’s pub, which explains his passion for food; and its role in entertaining friends and family.
As a teenager, Jamie headed to Kingsway College’s catering school, and it was here he found his forte. It led him to the kitchens of the River Café, the award-winning restaurant where he honed his ability. His experience there led to the 15 project.
Kingsway brought Jamie to London for the first time. Although Oliver’s persona is of a streetwise Londoner, the book reveals a young man whose childhood was sheltered: “Coming from a village where there were so many white people, on my first day at college I thought I was in New York,” he recalls. “Every day I thought I was going to be mugged.”
Jamie’s abilities as a chef are married to his confident nature on screen, but his biggest attribute is an ability to spot a trend. He played to blokes showing off to their girlfriends in The Naked Chef, championed social responsibility in Fifteen, highlighted what we feed our kids in Jamie’s School Dinners, and his most recent series saw him cook food he had grown himself.
His next series starts this autumn. It has been inspired by the Ministry of Information’s war time push to make sure we ate sensibly and didn’t waste food. Oliver showing how you can make great meals on a shoestring sounds like ideal, late-2008 credit crunch fare – just another sign of his ability to gauge the temperature of what’s cooking in the nation’s kitchens and act on it. |
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